The proposal team I wish we'd hired first
A year in, an honest look at the hiring order on our own proposal function — who we brought on in what sequence, and the reordering that would have saved us six months.
We run a proposal function inside PursuitAgent — the same function our product serves. This is a confession about the hiring sequence we ran for it.
I’m writing this because a prospective customer asked me last week which role they should hire first. My answer was confident and it was wrong. Here’s the real answer.
What we actually did
Month 1: I wrote proposals myself, as the founder, on the side of every other founder job. Roughly one every two weeks.
Month 4: we hired a proposal manager. Full-time. Her first six weeks were spent building a kickoff template, a compliance matrix template, and a review calendar — not responding to RFPs. I wanted that; she wanted that; it was the right call.
Month 7: we hired a presales engineer. He wrote the technical sections. He was very good at it. He was also an account engineer by inclination and hated writing.
Month 11: we hired a capture lead. This is the hire I got wrong.
What I’d do now
Capture lead first. Proposal manager second. Presales engineer third. My own hours on proposals go to zero after hire one.
Capture leads make the bid/no-bid decision. They do the pre-writing work — understanding the buyer, naming the evaluation panel, mapping the procurement landscape. They’re the role that separates teams that win 30% of their bids from teams that win 12%. A good capture lead turns a 15-hour losing response into a zero-hour no-bid plus a different 15 hours spent on a pursuit that actually has a shot.
I hired the capture lead fourth because I underestimated this. I assumed the proposal manager could absorb the capture work. She couldn’t — not because she wasn’t capable, but because proposal management and capture are different time-horizons. A proposal manager lives in the next 30 days. A capture lead lives in the next six months. The same person can do both for a while, but they will default to the closer deadline every time.
Between months 7 and 11, we bid on things we shouldn’t have bid on. I can count six of them. Three were losses we predicted. Three were losses that surprised us because we hadn’t done the capture work to see the incumbency pattern. The SME time burned on those bids — Qorus has documented that SME availability is the number-one proposal constraint across the industry, year after year — was the real cost. Not the proposal team’s hours. The engineers’ hours.
The reorder, with reasoning
Hire 1 — Capture lead. Senior, commercial-minded, ex-sales. Their job is bid/no-bid discipline and pre-writing work. They halve the volume you respond to and double the quality of the ones you do respond to. Lohfeld makes this case directly — the problem in most shops isn’t writing capacity; it’s that too much is being written.
Hire 2 — Proposal manager. The production role. Compliance matrices, review calendars, SME ticketing. This is a different skill set from capture and should be a different person.
Hire 3 — Presales / solutions engineer. Only after the first two are in place. If you hire this role first, you get technically correct proposals that lose because they’re not aimed at the right evaluation criteria.
Hire 4 — Writer (dedicated proposal writer or editor). By the time you’re responding to enough volume that hire 3’s engineering time is getting burned on writing, bring in a dedicated writer. This is often contracted before it’s salaried.
Why I got it wrong originally
I was solving the visible problem. The visible problem at month 4 was that drafts were rough and needed editing. A proposal manager fixes rough drafts. What I missed was that the deeper problem was earlier in the pipeline — we were writing about the wrong things because nobody was doing the capture thinking. A proposal manager doesn’t fix that. A capture lead does.
What’s the same a year later
Some things held up. Hiring a proposal manager early was right. Writing the first few proposals myself was right — it built the internal knowledge base of what good looks like at PursuitAgent specifically. And not hiring a dedicated writer in year one was right — we didn’t need that capacity at our volume.
What would I tell the prospective customer? Hire a capture lead first. Everything else follows from that decision or doesn’t.